Men who watch pornography may be shrinking their brains and dulling their responses to sexual stimulation, a study has found. It is the first time researchers have found a possible link between regular viewing of pornography and physical harm. However, an alternative explanation is that people who spend more time looking at pornography are born with a certain type of brain.
Dr Simone Kühn, the study’s lead author from the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, said it was the first evidence for a link between porn consumption and reductions in brain size and brain activity in response to sexual stimuli.
But the study can’t prove porn-watching causes changes to the brain, she said.
PORN SHOULD BE TREATED LIKE DRINK DRIVING, EXPERTS ARGUE
America is in the grip of a pornography pandemic that has become so serious it should be treated the same way as teenage smoking or drink driving, activists have warned. Dawn Hawkins, executive director of Morality in Media said porn must be tackled no differently than any major public health crisis. Speaking ahead of a two-day conference on sexual exploitation earlier this month, she said, if left untreated, addiction to pornography can leave users with psychological damage.
‘There’s a lot of science now proving that pornography is harmful,’ Hawkins said at the National Press Club in Washington.
Porn sites get more visitors per month than Netflix, Amazon and Twitter combined, a third of all downloads contain porn and the Internet now hosts 4.2 million porn websites. People who already have a smaller ‘striatum’ – the reward part of the brain – may be more likely to use pornography.
‘It’s not clear, for example, whether watching porn leads to brain changes or whether people born with certain brain types watch more porn’ she said.
‘Unfortunately we cannot answer this question based on the results of the present study’ she added.
For the study, Dr Kuhn and her colleague Jurgen Gallinat from Charite University, also in Berlin, recruited 64 healthy men between the ages of 21 and 45 years and asked them questions about their porn-watching habits.
They also took images of the men’s brains to measure volume and to see how their brains reacted to pornographic pictures, says the study published in JAMA Psychiatry journal (must credit).
They found noticeable differences in the men who abstained compared with those who regularly accessed sexual videos or images.
Dr Kuhn said ‘We found that the volume of the so-called striatum, a brain region that has been associated with reward processing and motivated behaviour was smaller the more pornography consumption the participants reported
Saturday, 31 May 2014
"Watching Much Porn Movies Shrinks The Brain"- Health Researchers see why
Men who watch pornography may be shrinking their brains and dulling their responses to sexual stimulation, a study has found. It is the first time researchers have found a possible link between regular viewing of pornography and physical harm. However, an alternative explanation is that people who spend more time looking at pornography are born with a certain type of brain.
Dr Simone Kühn, the study’s lead author from the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, said it was the first evidence for a link between porn consumption and reductions in brain size and brain activity in response to sexual stimuli.
But the study can’t prove porn-watching causes changes to the brain, she said.
PORN SHOULD BE TREATED LIKE DRINK DRIVING, EXPERTS ARGUE
America is in the grip of a pornography pandemic that has become so serious it should be treated the same way as teenage smoking or drink driving, activists have warned. Dawn Hawkins, executive director of Morality in Media said porn must be tackled no differently than any major public health crisis. Speaking ahead of a two-day conference on sexual exploitation earlier this month, she said, if left untreated, addiction to pornography can leave users with psychological damage.
‘There’s a lot of science now proving that pornography is harmful,’ Hawkins said at the National Press Club in Washington.
Porn sites get more visitors per month than Netflix, Amazon and Twitter combined, a third of all downloads contain porn and the Internet now hosts 4.2 million porn websites. People who already have a smaller ‘striatum’ – the reward part of the brain – may be more likely to use pornography.
‘It’s not clear, for example, whether watching porn leads to brain changes or whether people born with certain brain types watch more porn’ she said.
‘Unfortunately we cannot answer this question based on the results of the present study’ she added.
For the study, Dr Kuhn and her colleague Jurgen Gallinat from Charite University, also in Berlin, recruited 64 healthy men between the ages of 21 and 45 years and asked them questions about their porn-watching habits.
They also took images of the men’s brains to measure volume and to see how their brains reacted to pornographic pictures, says the study published in JAMA Psychiatry journal (must credit).
They found noticeable differences in the men who abstained compared with those who regularly accessed sexual videos or images.
Dr Kuhn said ‘We found that the volume of the so-called striatum, a brain region that has been associated with reward processing and motivated behaviour was smaller the more pornography consumption the participants reported
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment
Select "Anonymous" As Your Profile Or Login To Your "Google Account" Post A Comment!